MAGA Republican Lawmakers' Determination to Control America

 

Seventy years ago, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. 

Brown v. Board was a turning point in American history. It established that the U.S. government would, once and for all, use the Fourteenth Amendment to protect American citizens from discriminatory legislation written by state legislatures. 

Added to the Constitution in 1868, in the wake of the Civil War, as southern state legislatures were writing laws that made Black Americans subservient to white Americans, the Fourteenth Amendment asserted that the federal government could, and must, stop such discrimination.

It established that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment.

In the late nineteenth century, the Supreme Court nodded to racial segregation in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, getting around the Fourteenth Amendment by asserting that separate accommodations were fine, so long as they were “equal.”

But in 1954 a unanimous court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had previously been the Republican governor of California, ruled that racial segregation established by state law in public schools denied to Black children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. 

“Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” it wrote. 

Just two weeks before it decided Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court had decided Hernandez v. Texas, which established that not only Black Americans, but also Mexican Americans and all other nationality groups, were entitled to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. 

Over the following decades, the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down state laws against interracial marriage and gay marriage, and to establish equal rights for women, including the right to abortion. It also ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, constitutional.

That new legal framework, embodied in Brown v. Board, both established the equal rights that were central to the modern era and sparked a backlash against them. 

The federal requirement that states desegregate their public schools spurred southern state legislatures to pass laws and resolutions to block or postpone desegregation. In 1956, ninety-nine congressmen, led by South Carolina Democrat Strom Thurmond, wrote the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” quickly dubbed the Southern Manifesto, denouncing desegregation as unconstitutional. 

Lawmakers also found ways to transfer tax dollars to private schools, which were not covered by the Supreme Court’s decision. Attendance at so-called segregation academies exploded. By 1958, more than 250,000 students had migrated to segregation academies, a number that jumped to a million by 1965.

Those opposed to racial equality made common cause with those businessmen determined to get rid of federal regulation of business. In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr., the son of an oilman, started National Review, a periodical that promised to stand against an active government that protected labor and regulated business. Buckley said he would tell the “violated businessman’s side of the story.” 

In National Review, Buckley gave Virginia newspaper editor James Kilpatrick a platform to assure readers that desegregation challenged American values. Black Americans had no right to the equality declared unanimously by the Supreme Court, Kilpatrick wrote. Rather, the white community had an established right “to peace and tranquillity [sic]; the right to freedom from tumult and lawlessness.”

Desegregation would lead to bloody violence, he promised, implying that Black Americans would rage and riot, although, in fact, it was the white community that was attacking Black Americans.

In 1964, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater brought these two themes to his presidential campaign. He stood firm on the idea that the federal government had no business either regulating business or protecting equality. In The Conscience of a Conservative, published under his name in 1960, Goldwater asserted that the federal government had no power over schools at all and certainly could not order them to desegregate. 

Goldwater accepted the Republican presidential nomination in July 1964, less than a month after three civil rights workers registering Black Americans to vote had disappeared in Mississippi. Goldwater told his cheering supporters: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Strom Thurmond publicly announced that he would vote for Goldwater. 

Goldwater lost in a landslide, but his loss fed the backlash against federal protection of equality, especially after Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act to expand Black and Brown voting, moving many of those voters into the Democrats’ camp.

In 1968, Republican Richard Nixon courted Thurmond and white southerners with a promise to slow down desegregation and a defense of state’s rights. The so-called Southern Strategy moved the former Dixiecrats to the Republican Party. 

Religious traditionalists, particularly those among the Southern Baptist Convention, also opposed the federal government’s support for equality, although they got less press in the early years of that expansion. In their view, the Bible laid out hierarchical social arrangements, especially patriarchy. Government defense of women’s equality was a direct assault on their worldview. 

When he ran for the presidency in 1980, former California governor Ronald Reagan courted those religious traditionalists, and in 1985 his people made them a key part of the Republican coalition.

Americans for Tax Reform brought together big business, evangelicals, and social conservatives under the leadership of Grover Norquist, who had been an economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” Norquist explained, “but these groups can provide the votes.” 

In the following decades, Republican leaders used racist and traditionalist dislike of equal rights to turn out voters who would let them put their economic policies—cuts to taxes and deregulation of business—into place.

But those opposed to equal rights found themselves out of step with a majority of voters and unable to get their policies enshrined into law as courts continued to uphold equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women. 

The backlash against the federal protection of equal rights based on the Fourteenth Amendment entered a new era with the election of Donald Trump. In contrast to his predecessors, Trump let the racist and sexist voter base of the party drive policy. White evangelicals, especially, found in Trump an answer to their frustration at being sidelined by the courts and a majority of American voters. 

Despite his own lack of personal virtue, Trump was willing to smash through the laws and court decisions that had supported equality since the 1950s, offering to center the country on traditional religion and racial hierarchies in exchange for power. Under him, traditionalists saw the courts stacked with extremists who would prioritize their evangelical faith across society, including by ending the federal protection of abortion rights. 

Their fight to return Trump to power is part of their fight to establish traditional religion, rather than the equality promised in the Fourteenth Amendment, as the nation’s fundamental law. As Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote to Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as they plotted to overturn the decision of voters in 2020 to reject Trump: “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it.”  

Today, almost exactly seventy years to the day after Brown v. Board ushered in a new era of equality and democracy in the United States, MAGA Republican lawmakers Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Michael Cloud (R-TX), Eli Crane (R-AZ), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Bob Good (R-VA), Diana Harshbarger (R-TN), Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), Ralph Norman (R-SC), and Andy Ogles (R-TN) traveled to Manhattan to stand with Trump at his criminal trial for falsifying business records to interfere in an election.

The lawmakers made it clear that their determination to control the country has made them give up not only on the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence and defended by the Fourteenth Amendment, but also on democracy. 

Echoing the promise of the right-wing Proud Boys to Trump before they stormed the U.S. Capitol to install Trump into office despite the will of the voters, Gaetz tweeted: “Standing back and standing by, Mr. President.”

—Heather Cox Richardson

Notes:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/163/537

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep347/usrep347483/usrep347483.pdf

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/475

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015046344738&seq=38

James Jackson Kilpatrick, “Right and Power in Arkansas,” National Review, September 28,

1957, pp. 273–275.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/archival-video-barry-goldwater-speaks-1964-republican-national-40578479

Jane Mayer, “Ways and Means Panel’s Tax-Overhaul Proposal Brings ‘Family’ Strife to Conservative Coalition,” Wall Street Journal, November 27, 1985, p. 52.

https://www.kcra.com/article/texts-between-ginni-thomas-and-mark-meadows/39531243

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/matt-gaetz-lauren-boebert-appear-trump-trial/story?id=110319095

Twitter (X):

acnewsitics/status/1791223441179238892

 

Drug-Resistant Infections

 

The growing global threat posed by superbugs resistant to existing drugs will make the Covid pandemic “look minor”, the UK’s special envoy on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), Prof. Dame Sally Davies, has warned.

Davies said the immediate threat is “more acute” than climate change, while noting that the two crises are interlinked. She described what the world would be like if the problem is not tackled within a decade: “It looks like a lot of people with untreatable infections, and we would have to move to isolating people who were untreatable in order not to infect their families and communities. So, it’s a really disastrous picture. It would make some of Covid look minor,” said Davies, whose goddaughter died of an infection that could not be treated two years ago.

·       Is AMR already here? Yes. Drug-resistant infections already kill at least 1.2 million people a year, and one in five AMR deaths is in a child aged under five, usually in sub-Saharan Africa.

·       How are the climate crisis and AMR connected? Davies pointed to the way displacement, flooding and lack of clean water spread infection.   

-The Guardian

This is the moment aurora chasers have been waiting for

 

For the first time since 2003, an extreme geomagnetic storm — the most severe of its kind — hit Earth on Friday evening. Beautiful green, purple and red dancing aurora displays, also known as the northern lights, were spotted across Europe and very low latitudes in the United States, as far south as Alabama and Florida.
 
If you missed Friday’s show, more geomagnetic activity is expected to continue on Saturday and Sunday. As of Saturday morning, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast called for another strong geomagnetic storm on Saturday night, although slightly weaker than Friday’s show.

The aurora could be visible as far south as Illinois and Oregon with the naked eye, but could be seen farther south with a camera… NOAA scientists also warned of potential disruptions in satellite and radio communications, as well as to the electricity grid.
 
On Saturday morning, NOAA said in a statement that there were “reports of power grid irregularities and degradation to high-frequency communications and GPS.” Starlink, the satellite internet company, said it was “experiencing degraded service” on Saturday morning. A team is investigating the cause, but the satellites have been affected in the past by geomagnetic storms.
 
Geomagnetic storms are created when a surge of particles and plasma from the sun temporarily jostle Earth’s magnetosphere, sometimes resulting in the northern lights or technology disruptions. NOAA categorizes geomagnetic storms on a scale of G1 to G5, with G5 the most severe.

The agency anticipated a severe G4 storm, but the activity exceeded forecasts on Friday. Around 7 p.m. Eastern time, the storm reached the G5 level. The last time a storm of this severity hit Earth was in October 2003, resulting in power outages in Sweden and damaged transformers in South Africa.
 
The storm continued for several hours at varying strengths through Saturday morning, when it again hit a G5 level. NOAA calls for a strong (G3) level through Saturday, although the forecast may be updated as more solar activity arrives at Earth.
 
Forecasts anticipated the severe storm would bring aurora displays unusually far south in the Northern Hemisphere. The northern lights filled skies in France, Spain, Italy, Austria, southern Switzerland, London and India. In the United States, people reported sightings along Virginia’s Blue Ridge Parkway, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, New Mexico, Mississippi, Florida and Texas…

-Washington Post

Steven Wright

1 - I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.

2 - Borrow money from pessimists -- they don't expect it back.

3 - Half the people you know are below average.

4 - 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.

5 - 82.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

6 - A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.

7 - A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

8 - If you want the rainbow, you got to put up with the rain.

9 - All those who believe in psycho kinesis, raise my hand.

10 - The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

11 - I almost had a psychic girlfriend, ..... But she left me before we met.

12 - OK, so what's the speed of dark?

13 - How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?

14 - If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

15 - Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

16 - When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.

17 - Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.

18 - Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now.

19 - I intend to live forever ... So far, so good.

20 - If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?

21 - Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

22 - What happens if you get scared half to death twice?

23 - My mechanic told me, "I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder."

24 - Why do psychics have to ask you for your name

25 - If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

26 - A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

27 - Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

28 - The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.

29 - To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.

30 - The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.

31 - The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up.

32 - The colder the x-ray table, the more of your body is required to be on it.

33 - Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don't have film.

34 - If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.

35 - If your car could travel at the speed of light, would your headlights work?

 

Feeling Unsafe

 

I just watched a child’s last breath. Lying on a gurney, bloodied and terrified. Red pools forming under his head. Eyes glazing over with the unmistakable shroud of death. This is Rafah. This is what is happening now.

 

And yet, I keep seeing people say they feel “unsafe” because of the mere existence of encampments on university campuses. Feeling unsafe because others are protesting a genocide. And I think about what it actually means to be unsafe. Is there anything more unsafe than being displaced, starved, endlessly bombed, shot at, or buried alive?

 

I think of all the universities that have been obliterated in Gaza. Of all the professors that have been slaughtered. How safe are the students who once attended them? I think of the mass graves found in hospital courtyards. Bodies with zip-tied wrists, catheters, medical gowns covered hastily with waste and mud. Bodies of children, old people, the sick and the medical teams who once assisted them.

 

If you’ve done any work in human rights, you understand the horror that the term “mass grave” imbues. They are the absolute markers of atrocity.

 

Some have wasted no time reminding us that this is simply the “reality of war”. But is this really a war? I cannot recall another war where one side was able to so easily shut off the water mains, the electricity, the food and medicine shipments at will. 

If it is a war, I wonder where the soldiers on the other side are. Because I haven’t seen them either. I haven’t seen the other side’s tanks or drones or destroyers or aircrafts. I’ve only seen children, the elderly, the sick and the starving.

 

But I have seen soldiers. Soldiers from one side of this so-called “conflict”. They have been posting endless videos of themselves smashing children’s toys, defecating in kitchens, and parading around in the lingerie of women who have vanished. 

I’ve seen them making wedding proposals and holding podcasts on the rubble of bombed out apartment buildings. I’ve seen them hauling off jewelry, clothes and money. I’ve seen them firing on people waving white flags or who were simply crossing a road.

 

Much of the media, pundits and many politicians of all political persuasions have been wasting no time demonizing the student protests. They keep telling us how they make some people feel unsafe. And they continually tell us that this all started on October 7th. That this is a “retaliatory war”. And it’s true that terrible things were done on October 7th.

 

But they never mention the 80 years prior to that day. They never mention apartheid and forced displacement and night raids and indefinite detention of children and home demolitions and settler attacks and a crippling blockade. Wouldn’t those things make anyone feel perpetually unsafe?

 

The assault on Rafah has begun. Millions of starving, sick and displaced civilians are in harm’s way with nowhere to go. And yet I keep hearing pundits, politicians and the media demonize students for simply demanding that their schools stop funding it. And wringing their hands over some people feeling unsafe because of those demands.

 

I cannot help but think of that little boy I just saw die on a gurney. I’m pretty sure he would’ve gladly traded places with any of the people who keep saying they feel unsafe because there are some nonviolent protests on some university campuses.

 

CounterPunch

Kenn Orphan is an artist, sociologist, radical nature lover and weary, but committed activist. He can be reached at kennorphan.com.

 

How sad life would be without swearing by Seumas Miller & Rebecca Roache

 

The problem, though, is that not all swears are the same.      

In the 1960s, the philosopher J.L. Austin gave us the concept of “speech acts.” A word or sentence doesn’t only describe the world; they are jammed with nuance. When we speak, we not only have the content of the word but also the various, complicated, and often opaque background hues to try and understand. Swear words, for instance, are hardly ever about what the word represents: Telling someone to “fuck off,” for example, is literally hard to do (even though calling someone a “wanker” is likely accurate). …Swear words represent feelings.   

Sometimes, a swear word might express anger. In those cases, we might object to swearing around kids in the same way as we would having kids watch violent movies. It can be traumatic for a young child to witness anger, vitriol, and aggression. But not all swear words express anger. Sometimes, they might be for emphasis (“I’m so fucking tired”), sympathy (“That’s so shit”), disapprobation (“What a dickhead!”), or even affection. I’m British, and even the “worst” swear word, the C-word, can get repurposed as an endearment…

Swearing is permissible only in certain contexts. It might even be permissible around children. We can still agree with the “convention” argument and want society to be polite and respectful, but we can also accept that not all swearing is rude or disrespectful. Bad swearing is bad. Other swearing is okay.

Don’t be a dick!

…And yet, I find that difficult. I, personally, don’t swear in any way around kids, and that’s because there is another dimension at play here. That’s the fact that most modern societies give parents generous leeway in how they raise their own children. Bottle or breast milk? Sugar or limited sugar? TV or no TV? And swearing or not swearing? These are all acceptable, if hotly debated, ways to raise children. When we swear around children, we are essentially taking away a parent’s choice. We’re forcing them to be “pro-swear” people…

-bigthink.com 

Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at 200: Revolutionary work of art has spawned two centuries of joy, goodwill, and propaganda

 

In early 1824, 30 members of Vienna’s music community sent a letter to Ludwig van Beethoven petitioning the great composer to reconsider his plans to premiere his latest work in Berlin and instead debut the symphony in Vienna.

Beethoven had lived in Vienna since 1792, when he left his hometown of Bonn, Germany, to pursue a career as a composer. Beethoven rose to world renown, but by the 1820s he had fallen out of favor with Viennese arts patrons who, at the time, were drawn to the sounds and styles of Italian composers.

Beethoven had not appeared before a Viennese audience in a dozen years, but he was moved by the letter’s sentiment and agreed to debut his new work, Symphony No. 9 in D minor, in the city. The premiere performance was on May 7, 1824, at Kärntnertor Theater.

Concert promoters promised the public that the legendary – and legendarily antisocial – composer would be present at the performance of his latest symphony. Indeed, during the entirety of the performance, he was on stage, his back to the audience, as described by Maynard Solomon in his acclaimed biography of Beethoven.

The composer insisted upon conducting the symphony from a conductor’s stand. The official conductor at the concert, Michael Umlauf, had instructed the musicians – a Viennese orchestra and choir – to ignore Beethoven, who was completely deaf and who theoretically could not be relied upon to keep time.

The performance was interrupted several times by rapturous applause from the approximately 2,000 attendees, but Beethoven could not hear the reaction. According to eyewitnesses, the composer “threw himself back and forth like a madman” and fell several bars behind in his “conducting.”

The enthusiastic response to the symphony’s debut performance presaged its reception in the European music community, globally and across time.

Global appeal 

Symphony No. 9, sometimes referred to as the Choral Symphony, was the capstone to Beethoven’s extraordinary career. In the 200 years since its debut, the symphony has become an essential composition in the orchestral repertoire and is often cited as the crowning achievement of Western classical music.

A central reason for the symphony’s accessibility to a broad audience was Beethoven’s incorporation of the 1785 poem “An die Freude,” or “Ode to Joy,” by Friedrich Schiller, a leading German author, historian and philosopher. Matched to a memorable melody in the fourth movement, this text – with its uplifting, humanitarian sentiment – contributed to the symphony’s character as an anthem.

Widely interpreted as Beethoven’s plea for a global “brotherhood,” the fourth movement has been incorporated into ceremonial events sponsored by international organizations such as UNESCO, the Olympics, the Council of Europe and the European Union. Given the work’s fame the Ode to Joy section of the symphony has also been appropriated for propaganda by supporters of Nazism, Bolshevism, Maoism and other ideologies.

Groundbreaking composition   

Symphony No. 9 is extraordinary in many ways, according to Teddy Abrams, music director of the Louisville Orchestra and a Grammy Award-winning conductor.

The Ninth Symphony was not the first long piece of music at the time, but the others were generally built by stringing together many shorter sequences. In contrast, Beethoven crafted the Ninth Symphony – a 74-minute work – out of just four long movements. “The proportions alone are staggering,” Abrams said in an interview for this article.

Each of the Ninth’s four movements is a single cohesive, coherent musical statement. This, more than the innovation of using a chorus in a symphony, was what made Beethoven’s Ninth revolutionary, according to Abrams.

At the beginning of the last movement, Beethoven reprised elements of the previous three movements. This “quoting” was a highly unusual technique at the time, according Abrams. “It is from these musical ‘memories’ that the timeless Ode to Joy theme emerges,” he said.

Energy and drive

The symphony has influenced artists across the cultural spectrum, including various modern and avant-garde music genres. British composer Gabriel Prokofiev, grandson of famed Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, was commissioned by a French orchestra in 2011 to create a new work, Beethoven9 Symphonic Remix, that interpreted the symphony through a fusion of classical and electronic music.

When interviewed for the 2020 documentary film “Beethoven’s Ninth: Symphony for the World,” Prokofiev commented: “A lot of the techniques and approaches [Beethoven] used, particularly his climactic finales and his codas and the drama and the sense of energy and drive he had, we find that everywhere, especially in dance music and electronic music.”

For over a century, Symphony No. 9 has played an iconic role within the recording industry. Given the ongoing popularity of Beethoven’s work, record companies since 1923 have sought to release commercial recordings of this particular symphony. Early records couldn’t fit the entirety of the symphony, however.

Then, around 1980, two record companies – Sony and Philips – negotiated the length of the new digital compact disc format at just over 74 minutes per CD. According to Joop Sinjou, a Philips engineer who played a key role in developing the technology, Sony Chairman Akiyo Morita and his wife insisted that the new format be designed to fit the full Symphony No. 9. However, there are variations of the story, so it’s not certain that the companies’ decision to make CDs capable of holding more than an hour of music was specifically to accommodate Beethoven’s Ninth.

Goodwill symphony

Embedded in the symphony’s fourth movement is a message for peace with particular resonance in the 21st century. In one section of that movement, Beethoven incorporated a “Turkish March” featuring two instruments associated with Turkey: the cymbal and bass drum. According to Prokofiev, during Beethoven’s era Europeans discriminated against Turks.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 was performed in 2006 by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble that consisted of young Israeli and Arab musicians. The performance was part of a campaign for a peaceful resolution to the Middle East conflict.

YouTube videos of this performance have been viewed by millions. The aspiration of Beethoven’s “goodwill” symphony continues to inspire a vision of a united humanity.

Ted Olson, Professor of Appalachian Studies and Bluegrass, Old-Time and Roots Music Studies, East Tennessee State University